Carman: Well, good morning, everyone. I'm John Carman, and I'm the public affairs officer at Joint Forces Command, those of you that I haven't met before.

Welcome this morning. Our briefing this morning is on the major experiment and transformation event that Joint Forces Command is responsible for this year, and that's Millennium Challenge '02.

What I'd like to do is give you during the morning here -- we're scheduled to run, I believe, about 30 minutes -- a very brief overview of Millennium Challenge and then open it up to questions here with General Smith so you have an opportunity to get a little more detail.

We'd also encourage you to be following up with each of the services, because the services are responsible for individual service experiments within Millennium Challenge. We're not going to make you an expert today on all the details of the many facets of Millennium Challenge, but we're going to try and give you a real good overview and orientation to this major experiment that we have scheduled this summer in July and August, and also offer you the opportunity to come down to Joint Forces Command, particularly the Suffolk campus, and spend some time with us to get into some of these things in greater detail, and, when the exercise and experiment actually unfolds this summer, also give you the opportunity to come back and/or go out to the western training ranges where some of the field events are going to be held, as well as off the West Coast there, off the course of California.

Our briefer this morning is Brigadier General James Smith. And he is our lead officer for organizing Millennium Challenge. He's currently our deputy director for joint training when he's not doing -- I don't think you have any time to do anything other than Millennium Challenge, General; is that correct?

Smith: That's about right.

Carman: General Smith has been with Joint Forces Command for several years, and six out of the last 10 years of his career have been spent in joint duty primarily at the tactical level. So he comes to us with a great deal of joint experience that fits in very nicely with the need to work these things, experiments, into the future.

So I don't want to spend any more of the time here. I think I've gotten all my pre-announcements out. So if I may, let me ask General Smith to come to the podium.

Smith: Thank you.

I have no PowerPoint slides.

Q: Yay! (Applause, laughter.)

Smith: I'm also not going to lecture you. What I'd like to do is take about 10 minutes and walk through an overview, some of the basics, and then we'll have the rest of the time for questions. And I can go for 10 minutes or about two days. I'm going to try for the 10-minute routine and then key on the kinds of things you're interested in.

I've been doing this for two years. And Millennium Challenge really is a by-product of Joint Forces Command, their long-term transformation effort, and then Millennium Challenge is the near-term experiment, focused on 2007, with the idea of let's get our arms around all the stuff that's in the pipeline inside of this FYDP. So really the issue is not force structure. That would come in later experiments. But the issue is our C4ISR, all of the things that don't talk to each other, the way we plan and execute operations, that's really the focus of this event.

It's really the by-product of congressional language, which in retrospect was very helpful because it drove us to focus on the war- fighting challenges in this decade at the operational level and directed us to integrate the joint service experimentation and the service experiments at the same time. And that had never really been done before.

That has actually proven to be prophetic, because the direction forces us to integrate both live and constructive, has really forced us and the services to have to work together in a construct. Even though we're focused at the operational level, what I would tell you is the services working all this -- and as you look at the individual experiments of the services, all are focused at how to be interoperable, how to work with each other across functional components and how to integrate that which Joint Force headquarters is defining in the operational planning, rather than the food fight of take all of mine or take all of mine or take all of mine. So one of the initial successes of this effort is a move toward joint thinking or thinking of things in a joint context, which I think is fairly positive.

The overall experiment really focuses on this notion of how do I leverage the information revolution to improve the way I do military planning and execution. And if you start with a clean sheet of paper, the first thing you might ask is -- well, the first thing I'd like to do is know all there is to know about an adversary. The way we do military operations now, we always react in response to a crisis that an adversary has already set, on conditions favorable to him. How can I go back from that and use the information revolution to know all these is to know about him, in the beginning? Now we're calling that ONA, operational net assessment, which essentially is getting our arms around all the political, military, economic information/infrastructure of an adversary or a region, so that we can know more about him than he knows about himself.

And I don't think that's unrealistic, because if you look at the current global conflict, our adversaries know a whole lot more about us than we know about them, and in some cases they may know more about us than we know about ourselves. So how do we leverage our information superiority to be able to do the same thing for ourselves?

Now if I can do that -- and this is an experiment; that's why I say if -- but if you can do that, then how would you integrate all of U.S. and coalition national power -- diplomatic, information, military and economic -- against that adversary that you see as a system of systems? Okay? And how would you do that not just as a conflict starts, but as you influence and shape a crisis?

Which leads to the third piece of four principal parts of Millennium Challenge. It was pretty obvious to us that you can't do that in a reactive way, and you can't do it ad hoc. So you need a standing headquarters. We're using about 55 people that will be resident at the CINC headquarters that's doing this day to day to day. They're building this operational assessment this database of all information about a country, pending crisis, region, and then doing effects-based operations before the crisis starts.

Which leads to the fourth piece. Can't fundamentally change how we do military operations unless you re-look at the way the interagency works. Now early on in Millennium Challenge, we had this cell we called JX. The idea was to take all of the interagency liaisons at a CINC headquarters and get them an operational function which essentially gives us that same common picture of all of this data and information with a feedback back to their department forward to the country team and resident there at the CINC headquarters -- because the issue is not having the interagency work for the military; we are a part of the interagency.

But the issue was shared information -- more than just intelligence. If you want to know about a country, you can get an intelligence report, but you can also go at a wheat growers' convention. And you get some pretty good information about a country, because you're looking at investment.

How do you bring all that information together and share it among the interagency so that you can leverage their equities throughout the process?

So those are the four pieces; ONA effects-based operations using the DIME model against that; by understanding an adversary's systems; standing headquarters; and the joint interagency coordination group, which, as you all know, since 9/11 has gathered a lot of steam as a positive effort. But we need to technologically enable it.

When you look at some of the things the secretary has said, he's talked at different times about this three strategic imperatives in transformation. And one is our war-fighting capability. The second one is the maintenance coalition and allies. And the third is what he calls -- uses as dissuasion. If we only react in response to a crisis -- that's when we stand up a joint task force in a theater -- that's about the point where we stand up policy coordinating communications here in town and the dissuasion part happens before that -- how, then, do you dissuade an adversary? So the key piece of this is, how do you leverage U.S. national power in the influence, coerce/dissuade phase to shape a conflict, as opposed to just responding to it? And we're showing that that is actually pretty powerful as we do that.

Now, the standing headquarters, about 55 people doing this, is in the cohesive entity that a JTF headquarters would fall in on, but we're not using the traditional Napoleonic structure. It is a functionally organized headquarters around operations, plans, information superiority, and then the technology piece of how to technically keep that information together.

The idea here is instead of starting and spending all of your time collecting and processing information, which most joint task forces do today -- about 90 percent of their time they spend on collecting, processing information; intel people passing pieces of paper around and turning that into knowledge so that the commander can make a decision. What if you started with a knowledge base? Okay? All of that information is already there, and the tools resonant to mine it, what would you do? Well, you spend all of your time making better decisions. Again, that's part of the experiment construct.

And a collaborative environment. I don't mean collaborative tools, where you talk one on one. I'm talking about a collaborative environment where the Joint Task Force commander and his staff are planning collaboratively with the functional components and reach that center of excellence. We will have about 720 independent people in that collaborative environment for this experiment. That in itself is a quantum leap over anything we've done in a collaborative environment before. It completely changes the construct of how you do military planning. Instead of doing sequential or parallel planning, you, in a collaborative environment, are doing a lot of that simultaneously. So the time to plan should be reduced, and the time to rehearse and execute should be greater, or you take more time with a better solution.

The key part is, we're now getting into the modeling. And this is very exciting. Step back. All of us military people, all we have are attrition models. Every model we use is how many airplanes shot down how many airplanes, how many ships sank so many ships, or how many tanks killed so many tanks. Which means that most of the work we do as a military solution is kinetic, and we can only measure effects in terms of BDA.

But if you're going to be in a process of effects-based operations, you don't just want to shoot something or blow something up, you want to create an effect, which might be kinetic, might be non-kinetic, might be lethal, might be non-lethal, it may be a diplomatic piece at work, an intelligence community, not the military, at work. And if you're not going to blow something up, how then do you measure the effect? Well, now we get into a whole new realm of modeling called effects modeling. And DARPA is heavily engaged into this in the general model and groove, I think you've heard of, and the CYAN model.

Imagine if you're going to start planning an operation and you can model an action. I'm going to do this, and then through the CYAN model you get a quantitative assessment of how the adversary is going to respond. So you start looking at unintended consequences of your actions: second, third order affects, unintended consequences. So it starts to add a whole new dimension of planning operations, because now you have to bring in more than just kinetic military in your thought process.

Imagine at the end of the gulf war -- and I was flying over the Highway of Death, where we stopped. Imagine if we'd had that kind of modeling which could have said, okay, the effect of a 10-year presence in this theater will be this. Might we have done something differently? And again, I'm not second-guessing what we did. But you have to look at the theater political, economic information as well as just the strictly military picture when you start talking about end state.

So we're going to do a lot of things: assured access, we'll do -- information superiority is key to what the experiment is all about. Logistics to sustain the force is a key experiment, and then the conducting of effects-based operations.

The services are heavy into this, not only as partners with us, but we are enabling a lot of their experimentation. The Army will be doing the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) out at Fort Irwin. And actually, they will be moving that company IBCT 10 days after they get delivery. That's how important it is to get this up and moving. The Air Force is a global strike task force and a whole bunch of initiatives involving intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Reduce the time from sensor to shooter. But we are driving an experiment, Joint Fires Initiative, much broader than that, because it can't be one service. We got to have all the sensor platforms that each service, everybody else has -- we got to bring them to the table. We got to get our arms around them. We got to know where the electrons are going, who can see them, and then direct fires as necessary to achieve effects, which means we need functional componency. And now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization of war-fighting -- of functional components as opposed to service components.

Now, it is an experiment. There are a lot of things that we're packaging to look at and recommendations afterwards. I will tell you that the apples are falling off the tree left and right of things that are very, very obvious we need to do: JEMPERS-NT -- Joint Enroute Mission Planning Rehearsal System. Our Joint Battle Center went on a nine-month spiral development to create a capability to do enroute planning, and they were successful. It's about an 85, 90 percent solution. We've flown it off the Sole II C-17 twice. It works. General Franks saw it; likes it. So for $280,000, we built him a system and gave it to him.

The secretary flew it in his last trip to Afghanistan. Never broke contact. Now, that replaces five individual service SOCOM programs for light capability, and it replaces a $40 million outstanding ACTD that CENTCOM has for enroute planning and command and control. Spiral development works - or it does in this case. So that's now a reality. It's no longer an experiment. Which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. which means we need functional componency, and now you're getting in a whole different thought process of doctrine and the organization and war-fighting, the function components as opposed to service components. that's now a reality; it's no longer an experiment.

The Joint Fires Initiative, we're well past the theory. This works. It's necessary. Many of you know the Army and the Marine Corps are not integrated. And if you ever go on an exercise or an operation, look on the side of the wall, you'll see a map. And on that map, the first line you draw is a line -- the Army stay on this side, the Marines stay on this side, because the command control systems don't work. But now we've solved the bridge between MSC, the Army system, TCO, the Marine system, so they are interoperable. So now you're going to be able to integrate that. But doctrinally, it hasn't been a process that they've used, be forced into in Millennium Challenge.

So it's pretty exciting some of the things that are already very, very obvious that we need to integrate.

And the last is the interagency. We will have -- and we've got a lot of support by about 21 different members of the interagency to help us craft the Experimental Regional Security Strategy for 2007. And we will set up here in D.C. at five different places, joint staff: at the State Department, at FSI, NSC, and NDU. Those five locations, we will have collaborative systems that the interagencies will be participating on, engaged in, both Spiral Three, the first two weeks of June, and the execution of the Millennium Challenge. So actually, we're getting a lot of buy-in and support and hard work. That, I think, is very, very exciting, as the way of how to do business.

Well, with that, let me break and then open the floor to your questions.

Charlie?

Q: I just want to ask you a couple of nuts-and bolts questions. You use a lot of $20 words here -- "doctrinally" and things like that. You suggested that this thing's going to be overseen by 55 people at CINC headquarters in Norfolk, right? And also, since this is a model, is this going to involve some fictional country or region or scenario or what?

Smith: Two different questions -- let me answer the first one first. This is a experiment. Joint Forces Command has that Experimental Standing Joint Force Headquarters of 55. And they are the seed corn for a JTF to fall in for this experiment.

Q: So they can oversee this?

Smith: Not oversee; they will be an integral part of the execution body, a part of the JTF. What we envision as coming out of that -- and you know, we've got DPG language that says "Stand up standing headquarters" -- this is really what we're talking about. Each of the war-fighting commanders at the theaters will have a standing headquarters similar to this one. I don't know if it's going to be 55. It's somewhere between two and 200.

So -- but you're right; Joint Forces Command for Millennium Challenge -- post-Millennium Challenge, we've got direction from the chairman to validate in '04 and deliver to the CINCdoms in '05. That's true.

Q: (Off mike) -- a region, country scenario?

Smith: The scenario: We're using what's called a transliterated database. Now I grew up on a dairy farm in Georgia. I'd never heard of big words like that before. But what that means is, we are using real data points, from a real country.

Now we need to do that because in order to do the kinds of effects-based planing and execution, you got to get in the nodal analysis. So you can't just take a point on the map and say, "I'm going to attack that." You got to be able to take a power plant and do the nodal analysis all the way down to the eaches and very technical, okay -- and the positional relationships of the infrastructure, the road network, all of that is key, as well. So you can't just make up.

So we have taken real targets -- about 14,500 MIDB targets from country X. The reason the name of the country is not important is that the country is not important. I just need a real country. I mean, we're not practicing for the next conflict. We're not doing an old plan that exists. But I need a real target set. Now the transliteration part is, it's in the Southwest U.S.

So when you come to Millennium Challenge -- and I really invite you to come -- you will see a map of the Southwest U.S. and the infrastructure of country X overlaying that. But I'll tell you, it's really an interesting match. But we need real targets, because we've got, again, get into a nodal analysis.

Now we have developed about a thousand electronic target folders. In-depth look at each of these nodes, both military, economic, information and political construct that will then force the JTF to look at all of those other pieces in effects-based operations.

So yeah, there is a real country.

Q: What country is it?

Smith: Country X. It's not relevant. And it's classified, so --

Q: Will they be notional targets, or is it -- I know that they're based on, you know, a real place, but --

Smith: If you can imagine an area that is maybe 200 square miles by 200 square miles and just moved over and plopped on the Southwest U.S., that's the way you ought to think about it. The difference is, the Southwest U.S. is going to have more infrastructure, so in some of the construct we had to pull -- Highway 5 is a lot bigger than a lot of roads in other countries.

Q: Are you going to have forces actually doing things to targets --

Smith: Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is the beauty of integrating the live and constructive. I mean, about 80 percent of this is computer, constructive. Twenty percent of the force is live. So when you look at what's going on, you'll see a total integration of the live and constructive. But yeah, real people hitting real targets, creating real effects. But the target -- we will drop bombs on Nellis and shoot weapons on Irwin, not L.A. We'll -- but yeah.

Q: Let me know.

Q: But I mean, is there not -- you're not going to actually physically replicate anything from this country that you're taking the data from?

Smith: Not physically, no. Don't have to.

Carman: Sir?

Q: You talk about the Army's going to be trying out its interim combat brigade. What other -- what are the other services going to bring, you know, as far as new systems, new procedures for the fight?

Smith: A whole panoply from each of the services. Army -- interim brigade combat team, but that integrated with some legacy capabilities, like force entry, deep attack with Apaches, and we start looking at this future force with -- again, capability is still going to be here in 2007. The Army starts to show that you really need a capability to do -- to move lighter, to be more agile, and to work in a non-contiguous operations in a non-linear battlefield. That's what they're doing, and it actually is very powerful.

The Army will be the JTF headquarters III Corps and Lieutenant General B.B. Bell will be the JTF commander. That's important to us because that is the corps that has done most of the Army's experimentation over the last few years. So that's a real positive for us.

The Air Force -- when you integrate JEFX, which is the Air Force's experiment for next summer, we're really trying to bring together all of their sensor platforms and their work toward a coalition air operations center. Those are the key pieces of that. And then they have some other smaller experiments oriented around that, with a lot of visibility to Global Strike Task Force, which is their construct of putting F-22s and B-2s and ISR platforms to go global distance and hit key strategic and operational targets as we are crossing the blue line with the Maritime force ready to fight on arrival, and strategic lift to bring in a similar force and full dimensional protection. Then you've got a joint solution for anti- access.

The Marines will be doing a surface to objective maneuver, which is not an experiment, but they'll be using the high- speed vessel, a Navy experiment, to get part of that way. And then they'll road march or reposition to the Southern California Logistics Area, the base formerly known as George, to do urban warfare experimentation. That's really the key piece for the Marines.

The Navy has done some fascinating work on Effects Based Operations. They have kind of created from whole cloth a thought process for the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander. So you'll see, really for the first time, a integration of an operational level plan, the air tasking order, and now a Maritime tasking order that are mutually supportive. A lot of work between the Air Force and the Navy working through this.

SOF is big into this. Now, as most of you know, we've got a command-and-control network for the main force, and then historically the SOF community has been out here on their own trying to bring us together. So if you could imagine, instead of just chasing Scuds, like we did a decade ago, you did an early insertion of SOF to do unattended sensors, cold sensors, that detect movement, and you've got an integrated fires capability, all service equipment that's executed by the land-component commander, maritime-component commander, air-component commander, that as you integrate the ISR assets on that, get a detection through that network and then can target from whatever platform is available as something warms up, now you're not reacting anymore, you're being proactive. But the SOF is a key piece of that as well.

Who did I miss?

Q: Since you'll be probing things like political and military vulnerabilities and other things, can we assume that this country, without going into detail, might be a country that the United States might one day be involved in a conflict with? This is not just a benign scenario.

Smith: I'm not really tap-dancing around, but clearly, any country where you have the kind of database that we're using is a potential challenge for us. Otherwise, we wouldn't have that database. The last thing I want to do is to give the impression that we are planning an operation here or it's a part of an operation plan. It's not. We had to go to a real country to get real data. We can't collect that kind of data here in the United States. But as far as any delineation of the country or the implications of identifying that as somebody we're planning operations against would clearly be a mistake.

QBut if it were a Britain or a France, you know, it would be wasted effort other than the learning experience.

Q: General?

Smith: She was ahead.

Q: Go ahead.

Q: I just wanted to see if you could give an example, since you've done these exercises before, kind of to ground us in the real world, of what's been fed into operations or acquisitions, some example that you could pull from the past so we would have an idea of what you might get out of this.

Smith: Well, you have to understand that Joint Forces Command has not been doing this very long. Three years. So the first joint experiment was two years ago, and was really just an umbrella for what the services were doing. So this is really our first turn in the barrel to shape. So not a lot of historical joint examples on integration. But coming out of this -- just gave you three: integration of MCS, TCO, which forces the ground component --

Q: Could you explain what that means? I'm sorry.

Smith: You would think that the Army and the Marines can be operable on the battlefield, wouldn't you? Would you think a farmer in Kansas would assume that would be so?

Q: (Laughs.) I have no idea.

Smith: Well, no, they can't. What they have to do is plan -- again line, and you stay on that side of it; you stay on that side of it -- because their command and control systems for battalion and above don't talk to each other. So one's looking at one picture; the other's looking at another picture. Maneuver Control System -- MCS -- is the Army's battalion-and-above command and control system. It doesn't look at or talk to tactical-control operations the Marines' battalion-and-above command and control system. So what we want to do is integrate them, have them mutually supportive for the ground and also the same thing for air and maritime components. So that's going to be one success.

Another is the integration of all ISR platforms. Why here we got stray electrons going around the battlefield that nobody knows where they came from or who's seeing them? Want to be able to see them all.

Now if you look at a map of Afghanistan, you really start to see the way ahead of the integration of all this. There's no lines in the operation of the last six months. And the question is, can you do that if you don't have a permissive environment? But the integration of our intelligence community, our diplomatic community and military -- of all the services -- that's kind of a picture of how we see operations in the future: nonlinear, non-contiguous. But there's more challenges if your adversary doesn't allow you freedom of movement.

Q: General, the backdrop to this question is the experiment the Army conducted at the National Training Center several years ago, in which they had their digitized outfit, and the IDA assessment afterward was that they suffered more casualties than if they did not have a digitized outfit. And admittedly, they've probably done a lot of things since then to improve that performance. But is this going to be any kind of a litmus test for the digitized brigade today for the Army?

Smith: It won't be an examination. We'll get observations from it. The unique challenge for the digitized Army is that with DCX I was a division. DCX II was corps. So that whole construct is the Army corps and below and how it operates as an independent entity. I don't see the future as being corps and below; that's tactical execution. What I see for us, for the joint operational level, is above corps. So if you take that construct, I'm not really interested in a corps headquarters that can only talk to the Army and has to bring all of its stuff, carve out its own terrain in order to be effective. I need a command and control capability -- digital -- that links to the air component and the maritime component so that I can bring whatever fires are necessary to hit targets, not just my own, that uses all ISR assets in an integrated fashion, not just my own, and I live in a world outside of the Army corps and below.

Q: You mean to say, in other words are there any Army digitized outfits participating in?--

Smith: Oh, absolutely.

Q: And so you'll get some kind of a fresh --

Smith: Oh, absolutely.

Q: -- litmus test of how they perform, right?

Smith: Oh, sure. Sure. And really for the first time in a joint context we will. And a very aggressive data collection and assessment process going on.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about the --

Smith: I promise you're next. I know you've been sitting there with your hand up.

Q: -- about the effects modeling you mentioned of the DARPA, CYAN. I understand the difference between the tradition attrition model of this. But I'm not sure how you're actually using this in this experiment. Is it something that you're doing during the experiment to support decisions?

Smith: Absolutely. And it's supporting decisions not just in execution, but supporting decisions in the first two weeks of June, where we're in kind of the shaping process: Is it possible for us to leverage national power so we don't automatically default to a kinetic solution in an experiment.

Q: So the interagency group will be involved --

Smith: Yes, sir. They're key to this. Absolutely key.

Yes, ma'am.

Q: What kind of after-action review will you be doing? I mean, will it be like what you normally find in the services, the way they do after-action reviews?

Smith: It'll be similar, but it'll get a lot more attention. And first of all, there will be an after-action review done on the spot. There will be -- and we can't just wait for five months of study and publish data and draw conclusions. The train's moving too fast. So we have to stop on the spot, do an AAR, after- action review, and capture all the commander inputs and assess how valuable each piece was. Then we'll put out within about two weeks, I think, we'll plan for a first look report. And then, December-ish you'll see a full report where you've got the data to support conclusions that come forth.

Q: So will the services be graded on how well they did a joint operation?

Smith: No. No, the issue is not to grade. The issue is to capture those kinds of things that are valuable in the way ahead.

As far as grading their performance in the operation, that's not what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is assess whether or not we can change the way we plan and then give orders to execute, whether or not we need to move toward fully integrated, fully networked capabilities, but not necessarily grading the forces themselves.

Q: Is there a formal process, though, for pushing the lessons learned into the system? Do you come back and brief the secretary, the Joint Staff, each of the combatant commanders?

Smith: Yeah, I briefed the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee (JROC) twice myself on different pieces of this -- the standing headquarters and the overall Millennium Challenge. I'll be back in to brief the JROC mid-June on the update.

And as you know, there's been a change in the JROC process away from systems or platforms into capabilities. So all of the lessons learned that we're looking at really fall into that construct of emerging capabilities. And it's a part of the maturing relationship between the Joint Staff and Joint Forces Command as we partner on transformation, which of course the secretary's fully committed to.

There will be a formal process of DOTMLPF packages -- doctrine and organization, training, leader development, materiel, personnel and facilities. And we're tracking about 42 of those insights that we need to keep pushing down track. Those we'll bring in to the Joint Staff and work through the JROC process to do just that.

And of course, the first deliverable is, as the chairman said, the standing headquarters -- very powerful. So experiment in '03, validate in '04, deliver in '05. It's not really an experiment anymore.

Q: Can you speak to the -- a little bit more detail on the direction that you've been given from the Defense Planning Guidance this time around? You mentioned that they had reinforced the directive to get this Joint Force standing headquarters up and running. Can you talk a little more specifically about what they've asked from you, what they want to see in that area specifically and in other areas?

Smith: Well, the issue of transformation's very, very important to this administration and to the secretary. So the -- you know, the focus of this brief is specifically Millennium Challenge. And when you come down to look at Millennium Challenge, what we need to do is give you kind of an end-to-end look at transformation and where Joint Forces Command fits into that. And certainly some of the language in the DPG, some of the chairman's directives, secretary's directives to us all point at integrating that transformation process with us really focusing on the operational level.

Carman: We have time for about two more questions.

Q: General, can you can say -- what role does human intelligence play in contributing to that base of knowledge that you start to work off of?

Smith: Huge. Huge.

Q: And how do you replicate that in this kind of an exercise?

Smith: You replicate it in what we call white cell adjudication. You're going to have to assume. The big issue is not -- for this experiment, which looks a lot like an exercise; it's really an experiment -- where you get into HUMINT, it's not so much -- I have to know that the other side is saying. So as the executor of the experiment, I know what Blue is looking at, but I also know Red, inside and out. And in the effects-based planning process, I built that huge database of all that. So what I do then is force the audience to be asking those questions that only HUMINT can answer, but we would then, through a white cell process, have an expert in that providing an answer, because I don't have a real HUMINT person in country. So for this we've got a whole series of senior mentors that represent the military, as well as the interagency, who is ?? an expert to be able to do just that kind of thing.

Q: Similar to what you've done with the target set you said you'd take an actual target set. from an actual country. It's country X. Do you also draw upon the existing knowledge gained from human intelligence from that country?

Smith: As best as we can. But realize, when I if you can imagine how huge this database is, we've been working full speed for a year. I truly tell you, we're only that far into -- enough to execute the experiment. But you know, this whole process of bringing the interagency together is going to be its own challenge, because you've got to build relationships, you've got to be willing to share information. And 9/11 has forced that community -- the whole community to do that.

But yeah, we will get there eventually. Your issue is a valid one, and certainly we've got to leverage HUMINT in a huge way, if you're going to understand the society that you're focused on. It's more than just looking at targets. You've got to understand motivations, the integration of the society, all the social kind -- cultural, religious -- that impact that nation and its coherence. So, very, very important.

Q: In this one, I know you're going to be tying together a lot of U.S. forces. Is there any part of it that's going to replicate possible coalition operations?

Smith: Yes, sir, there will. The big piece for coalition that's real is the Air Force's part of the coalition AOC -- Air Operations Center. We made a conscious decision not to wade into the multinational piece on Millennium Challenge 02 because of time. We're taking a very big bite of the elephant right now. We will replicate the multinational challenges, and then, by '04, General William Kernan has committed himself that we're going to wade into the multinational, which then involves technical solutions to security as well as operational challenges associated with a coalition. There's just so much you can do in two years.

Q: Could you kind of -- for purposes of us picking our coverage, could you kind of lay out the timetable of this thing, what's going to be happening in Norfolk, what's going to be happening in the Western Ranges, so that we can kind of judge when or where we should be?

Smith: The -- actually, I think John has got more detail. But I'll lay it out in general terms. And we've actually been -- we have executing for about eight months now. So Spiral 3 happens the 4th through the 14th of June. That will be all at Suffolk, at the Joint War-Fighting Center, Joint Forces Command. The key event there is it will look like a rehearsal, but it's more than that because we are asking the Joint Task Force commander and his staff, the functional components, to build an effects tasking order which lays out the force flow and the TPFDDB for the start of operations on the 24th of July. It will be total planning effort, not execution.

Then, at the end of that, you've got TPFDDB flow, just kind of blind from everybody else, and then, on the 24th of July, we reform again, and in four days you will go from a planning to execution with two live windows. Of the 26 to 28 July -- (to staff) -- Is that right on the date?

Carman: Yes, sir.

Smith: And then the 6th to 8th of August are the two, quote, "live windows."

So those will be the two areas that I would bracket for going out to one of the seven ranges. And the key places where we're setting up DV bureaus and information bureaus are out at Nellis, Fort Irwin --

Carman: Coronado.

Smith: -- Coronado, and we may be getting out on the Coronado when it comes back into port on the 29th of July. And the SOF community will be showcasing the SOF's capabilities there at Coronado. And we're still working with the Marines, if we're going to do the STOM operation or if, in fact, they're going to set up shop there on -- at George.

I recommend to you, the live is the sexy piece, okay? No, that's where you're seeing people getting dirty and do things. Unless you understand that operational other piece of how those forces were chosen to be there in that place and time to do that job, you're really kind of missing what the experiment is all about. That's why I highly recommend you find the time to come to Suffolk and get that whole piece, and then go to one or a number of the other services places and see how it fits together.

Q: Suffolk -- the situation will be going on through the entire scenario, but bracketed by these two actual windows?

Smith: Absolutely, 24/7 at Suffolk.

Q: Thank you.

Smith: One --

Q: Is that -- is that Marine high speed vessel, is that the one that they've been leasing on Okinawa, or --

Smith: This is actually really exciting. And it really hits to the core of transformation and why it's important.

If you look at a high speed vessel as a Navy piece of transformation, it's a boat that goes 10 knots faster. So if you hear this is a Navy experiment, you go, Okay, so what's exciting about that? It's a twin-hull catamaran as opposed to a single hull ship. It goes 10 knots faster. Wait. Think of it in a joint context and look at how we're using that in Millennium Challenge, then it starts to be pretty exciting, because a high speed vessel will do early insertion of SOF, to do shaping of the environment before actual live operations kick off. It then re-positions to pick up part of the Marines. It's not a Marine experiment. But Marines are going to be on it for part of them ship to objective maneuver. After that, it re-roles to do a couple of key naval experiments. And at the end we pick up the IBCT, put it on a high-speed vessel, and go from Long Beach all the way to Seattle. Now you're starting to talk about a transformational capability where you -- we think the re-position of forces in noncontiguous operations on a non-linear battlefield. That is truly transformational.

Now, I'm not saying that high speed vessel is the right materiel solution. But I'm saying that that is something we really got to start to look at.

Q: Thank you.

Smith: Thank you.

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